David > Books: favorites‎ (67)

Like so many alert and active-minded girls, she possessed in a great degree the quality of interesting herself in - or, as he brother Fillmore preferred to put it, messing about with - the private affairs of others.

"... And she's got brains enough for two, which is the exact quantity the girl who marries you will need."

Be wry, I admonished myself. Be bland. Think David Niven. 

Having never before heard a sexy megastar compare me favorably to his dashing signature role, I lost all grip on my suavity and giggled like a chorus boy being tickled by Bernadette Peters.

"Good afternoon, Mr. Bajour," said Gilbert in his lowest register. His intent, I suppose, was to convey masculine authority but it just made him sound like Bea Arthur.

Gilbert, as a rule, used money the way women used pepper spray; he liked having some handy but only produced it when physically threatened.

The promise that had simmered in Stephen's gaze had, of course, been firmly predicated on my persuading Lily not to tell the world of his teenage discovery that strong, hairy thighs make swell earmuffs.

There was Sonia, of course, her girth encased in a pin-striped black pantsuit that made her look like one of the gangsters in an all-lesbian 'Kiss Me, Kate'.

"Our civilization, in this point, has always been absurdly defective. Men have kept women at a barbarous stage of development, and then complain that they are barbarous. In the same way, society does its best to create a criminal class, and then rages against the criminals."

"I am seriously convinced that before the female sex can be raised from its low level there will have to be a wide-spread revolt against sexual instinct. Christianity couldn't spread over the world without help of the ascetic ideal, and this great movement for woman's emancipation must also have its ascetics."

Rhoda... probably desired a union which would permit her to remain an intellectual being; the kitchen, the cradle, and the work-basket had no power over her imagination. As likely as not, however, she was perfectly content with single life--even regarded it as essential to her purposes.

"Please don't make me your confidante, Mr. Barfoot," Rhoda replied with well-assumed pleasantry. "I have no taste for that kind of thing."
"But I can't help doing so. It is you that I am in love with."
"I am very sorry to hear it. Happily, the sentiment will not long trouble you."

"... it's not how deep you can see into another person's mind that determines what you really know about him: the important thing is what level of

"... it's not how deep you can see into another person's mind that determines what you really know about him: the important thing is what level of your own mind you are able to see him with."

"I guess I got too much imagination and I'm too innerested in people and what goes on for my own good. Mamma is always saying, 'Hazel, your imagination and the way you're innerested in people and what goes on is going to be your ruin yet. I never saw a girl with so much imagination,' she says. 'You ought to be a writer and make money out of it.'"

They were much alike in appearance, both of them being bony, solidly built women who seemed capable of turning even the heaviest mattress with one quick, efficient flip of their wrists.

"It's quite a gruesome little story; perhaps you'd like to hear it, Clark. It has its amusing side, too. There's an element of pure terror in it, and it has always seemed to me that terror is the basis of all true comedy."

"Mr. Shaddock, that other girl was big and sort of rangy, and she didn't take any pride at all in her appearance. She had a bartender haircut, and she wore a man's coat. When she walked, she swaggered like she owned the place."

... he felt disgusted, weary of this cheap and alien place, this loud, throaty, rootless, and sensual culture, this aggregate of clever, itchy, self-absorbed apes--vulgar, uncaring, while their flimsy civilization was, like London Bridge and all bridges, falling down, falling down.

He felt momentarily like Henry Thoreau, and smiled at himself for the feeling. 'Most men lead lives of quiet desperation.'

"... I am carrying a weapon. I always carry it."
"An Anthean weapon?"
"Yes. A very effective one. You would never have made it across the floor to my bed."
Bryce inhaled rapidly. "How does it work?"
Newton grinned. "Does Macy's tell Gimbel's?"

... I have felt my humanity thoroughly erased many times. At those times, I remind myself: Ani, this is why you can't rely on the affirmation of others for your own self-worth. If you are counting on the big thumbs-up from the world to get by, you leave yourself open to getting slain.

Music results in deep empathy for one another and therefore a feeling of wholeness within ourselves.

"What a foul-up. You and your domestic life; it's wrecking the plans of two inter-system empires, Terra's and Alpha's--did you ever think of it that way?"

"I also heard the slime mold declare," Mary said, "that you're not a person but a simulacrum."
"Person, shmerson," Mageboom said. "Does it matter?"

"... *There is no protection.* Being alive means being exposed; it's the nature of life to be hazardous--it's the stuff of living."

"Suppose the tests show no drift, no neurosis, no latent psychosis, no character deformation, no psychopathic tendencies, in other words nothing? What do I do then?" Without unduly complimenting himself--at this point he was well beyond that--he had an inkling that was precisely what the tests would show. He did not belong in any of the settlements here on Alpha III M2; here he was a loner, an outcast, accompanied by no one even remotely resembling him.

Sandy had lived too long with three women not to have learned to hold his tongue about the private doings of each of them. When Annjee paid two dollars a week on a blue silk shirt for his father at Cohn's cut-rate credit store, and Sandy saw her make the payments, he knew without being told that the matter was never to be mentioned to Aunt Hager. And if his grandmother sometimes threw Harriett's rouge out in the alley, Sandy saw it with his eyes, but not with his mouth. Because he loved all three of them--Harriett, Annjee and Hager--he didn't carry tales on any one of them to the others. Nobody would know he had watched his Aunt Harrie dancing on the carnival lot today in front of a big fat white man in a checkered vest while a Negro in a red suit played the piano.

One funny thing: on her way out, she gave me a peculiar smile and said, 'I find myself doing so many things these days that I've never done before.'

And loved.

There was a short bar to the right, presided over by an enormously fat woman wearing a bright blue dress and quantities of gold jewelry. She wore an expression which said: "When I'm sent to Hell, the devil will contrive no greater punishment than to keep me behind such a bar in such a place as this..."

He looked at me steadily. "It has been in my mind for years now that we can make plays from stories that happen in our lives. I believe this is the way that plays will be made in the times to come."